That Bella Swan; she’s no Katniss Everdeen. Both teenage heroines journey deep into the woods at dusk, but while Twilight's Bella returns flanked by bickering supernatural beefcake, Katniss emerges alone, smeared in blood and muck and gnawing on the charred remains of a spatchcocked squirrel. In The Hunger Games, the characters don’t fall straightforwardly into one team or the other. There are no vampires vs werewolves here, just Katniss on one side and the rest of the world on the other, although you wouldn’t fancy the rest of the world’s chances.

The Hunger Games is an adaptation of the first in a set of three fantasy books aimed at younger readers by Suzanne Collins, in which teenagers culled from the 12 districts of a post-Apocalyptic nation called Panem are pitted against each other in an annual, state-sponsored fight to the death.

Collins’s work has often been compared with Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels (primarily because both centre on young women and have been phenomenally successful) but the concept owes more to the Japanese author Koushun Takami’s cult novel Battle Royale, itself adapted for the cinema in 2000 by Kinji Fukasaku. There are also borrowings from Stephen King’s The Running Man, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and, of course, real life: it wasn’t so long ago, geologically speaking, when panem et circenses [bread and circuses] was the state’s preferred method of keeping the rabble in order. But despite its well-worn ideas and themes, Gary Ross’s provocative, pulse-surgingly tense adaptation couldn’t feel fresher, or timelier.

You can’t take your eyes off Jennifer Lawrence as the ox-hearted, mud-freckled Katniss, who volunteers as her district’s female Games contestant to save her younger sister from the draft. She’s even more compelling here than she was in the 2010 indie Winter’s Bone, a strikingly similar role for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

Katniss’s male counterpart is named as Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), and the pair are whisked by train to the Capitol. As the Appalachian gothic of their district gives way to the vivid, candy-toned steampunk city, we feel every flutter of their exhilaration: the production design by Philip Messina is dazzlingly odd and frequently inspired.

Here, the contestants are groomed, styled, trained and then paraded on a fiendish burlesque of Saturday night television. Among a uniformly terrific supporting cast, that includes Woody Harrelson as a jaded former winner and Donald Sutherland as the Capitol’s snowy-maned oligarchical ruler, Stanley Tucci is hypnotically good as the cobalt-haired TV host who interviews Katniss with treacly insincerity. And then almost before we’re ready, the teens are thrust into the arena; a forest loaded with cameras and weapons caches, from which there can emerge, so the rules dictate, only one survivor.

Ross and his cinematographer Tom Stern, capture the action up close with twitchy, often hand-held camerawork: not only is it a perfect match for the punchy, urgent prose of Collins’s novel, it lends the film a teenager’s heart-in-mouth hyper-awareness. The screenplay, co-written by Ross, Collins and Billy Ray, deftly pulls together all of the novel’s itchiest themes: the Faustian pact of instant celebrity; the ever-broadening gap between the have-nots and the haves; the basic human urge to confer narrative, and so meaning, on human life in all its nasty, brutish brevity.

The Hunger Games is an essential science fiction film for our times; perhaps the essential science fiction film of our times. Whatever your age, it demands to be devoured.